Recording Stern & Sirius sound quality
09-Jan-2006
With Howard Stern's premiere on Sirius today, I've been looking
for the right software to record the show for the past week. I
downloaded High Criteria Total Recorder 5.3 Standard Edition
and it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for.
I want to maintain high sound quality, but I don't want to deal
with large WAV files. The show airs from 6am to 11am Monday thru
Friday with a 1-hour wrap-up show, so that's 6 hours per day and 30
hours per week. Although recording in the WAV format would produce the
best quality, it'd be impractical for my needs and difficult to
backup all those GBs of audio bits. So I settled on recording to
MP3.
Total Recorder can output to MP3 using the LAME encoder, so I set
it to output an MP3 with a 320kbps bit rate (which I believe should
be more than sufficient). A 6-hour recording produces a file
size of ~875MB. 875MB * 5 = 4,375MB (4.375GB) and that will fit on a
single DVD±R, i.e. I can fit a week's worth of shows on one
recordable DVD.
For daily listening I use my 60GB iPod, however the iPod doesn't
support 320k MP3s. So I use Audacity
to trim the file and then re-encode it to 96k, which produces a file
size of ~275MB. Yes it takes an additional step and produces two
files, but the smaller file size is easier to manage and transfers
take less time. So far, it's worked perfectly.
I've had Sirius for almost a month and I can say it's sound
quality is good, not great. Sirius employs compression, which is
most easily heard on the
music channels, resulting in sound quality below that of CDs. The
dynamic range and punch you'd hear from a CD is missing on Sirius.
It's far better than the
static-filled hiss of FM, but it could be much improved. In fact,
people who have both Sirius and XM report the latter's sound quality to be
far superior.
The other important issue with satellite radio is reception. Weak
reception can result in dropouts and a loss of signal will simply
result in silence. The antenna should be placed by a window (or
outdoors) where it has a good line of sight to a satellite or
terrestrial repeater. However, other factors such as bad weather can
still wreak havoc on reception regardless of antenna placement. On
the first rainy day since getting Sirius, I found reception to be hit or miss
and ended up turning off the Starmate Replay
altogether.
My main reason for subscribing to Sirius was for the Howard
Stern show. The other channels and programs are almost a bonus.
Overall, I am extremely pleased with the improved sound quality of
the show compared to when it was on FM radio. The difference is
night and day when listening through in-ear headphones like the
Etymotic Research ER6i.
Hopefully, Sirius will improve the sound quality of all channels by
using better and/or less compression. As it stands now, Sirius makes
sense for me because Howard brings me hours of entertainment every
day.
|
